How To Use Sony Acid Pro 7's Beatmapper

May 21, 2009 3:29 PM

EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS ARTICLE WAS SUBMITTED TO REMIX BY SONY CREATIVE SOFTWARE. ALSO READ THE REMIX REVIEW OF SONY ACID PRO 7 AND THE TUTORIAL ON FINDING TRACK TEMPO IN ACID PRO 7.

This step-by-step tutorial references "If It Kills Me" by the amazing songwriter/artist Jason Mraz, and I use a 320 kbps MP3 of the track. This is an excellent track for testing Beatmapper because it doesn't start with music at all, but rather, a recorded phone message. Most songs in final master form will not start the beat right away, for artistic or other reasons.

1. Load up Acid Pro 7. By default you will get a blank project. In the Preferences, make sure the setting called "Automatically start the Beatmapper Wizard for long files" is checked. You can always turn it off later, in the Wizard itself.

2. First step is to find the MP3 or WAV of the song you want to Beatmap for the remix project and then drag and drop it into the blank project space. The Beatmapping Wizard will instantly and automatically launch.

3. The Beatmapper Wizard presents you with Step 1, which is to determine the downbeat of the song. Drag the downbeat marker past any intro until you hear the first beat in the song. I was able to do this in just a few seconds. You can use both the scroll bar at the bottom or the scroll wheel on any standard mouse to quickly zoom into the mix to find the placement. Don't worry about being exact yet; just get it pretty close and the click Next.

4. The next screen -- Step 2 -- shows an estimated length of a measure. You can change both the start and finish points of this measure. This screen also includes an optional MIDI metronome, which can help you sync up the measure. Halve and Double features can help you find a more accurate tempo suggestion. At this point, it looks like Jason Mraz's track is about 71 bpm. Click Next.

5. The Step 3 screen quickly calculates measure estimates for the whole track. Helping you further analyze start and stop points for various measures. This is super useful because you can use the Measure scroller to quickly zoom through the song to determine if the calculations were accurate or if you need to change something. Beatmapper calculated that it's about 72.011 bpm, after analyzing the whole track. As I look through the track, it seems to be in sync with the Metronome pretty much throughout the track (a good sign). Click Next.

6. The final screen (Finished!) gives us options to set the tempo for the whole project and/or preserve pitch of the Beatmapped track if we decide to change the tempo in the remix. Go ahead and leave both checked and click Finish.

7. Acid Pro 7 has loaded the song into the track view area. Be careful with some songs as there can be "swaying," or loose tempos, that go back and fourth. For a remixer, this is fine if you have the basic tempo down. You will be able to chop it up later and fix any strange discrepancies. The software also chopped off the audio before the original downbeat we chose. Once you line up that downbeat with one of the measure bars, you can drag it back out to put the original material back.

8. Beatmapping technology isn't perfect, but it helps you get pretty close. Because I feel that the producers probably didn't have the original session at 72.011 bpm (generally producers work with nice clean numbers), I round down to 72 bpm in the final session track and re-listen to make sure this didn't mess it up. It sounds great. I just used the ALT+DRAG technique in Acid Pro 7 to move over the beat to the left a little, and with "Loop mode" on, I can experiment with different sections of the song.

9. The final step is to use the Marker tool (Press M), and label each section of the song. This will help you construct your own remix from the original composition, as well as export various parts of the song for remixing. In this case, we used a final recording, but the steps are similar with multi-tracks. It's always good to use a drum track in Beatmapper for best results.

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